The Orbital Conglomerate™

If you spend any amount of time thinking about who owns some of the companies you spend money with, you will likely have heard of The Orbital Conglomerate™. Across the multiverse, The Orbital Conglomerate™ - Orbital, for short - owns, or has partnerships with, companies of all shapes, sizes, and purposes, from household essentials manufacturers to an underwater polo stadium; from galaxy cleaning services to your local public house. Emporium is one company that has ended up in the orbit of Orbital.

The ongoing partnership between Emporium and Orbital has allowed Emporium staff to focus more on things they specialise in, including stocking and day-to-day running of the store. Orbital, meanwhile, covers more of the high level or out of store work, including managing accounts for tax purposes, interdimensional advertising, and long-term business strategy.

Given that the bulk of the work is handled externally to Emporium and has little direct impact on the store, there are relatively few Orbital employees to be found at Emporium. The few that are present are generally concerned with store management, perceptions of Emporium, customer patterns, and employee upskilling.

“Just call us Victor - everyone does!” is a boisterous, ageing Glory who’s usually far too busy in their office doing far too much important work to mingle with Entities in the store. As the most senior Orbital employee in store, Victor’s work focuses on improving the services Orbital provides in its partnership with Emporium first and foremost. While they are personable and in theory open to chatting about any subject¹⁾, they usually stay in their office in the administration employee area of Emporium and delegate the lower-level aspects of the work Orbital does for Emporium to their personal assistant, Serendipitous-Swift-Sensical (alias Swift) and, more recently and to a much lesser extent, the work experience Glory, Spreadsheet.

A heron Chimera who serves as secretary to the Orbital management representative, We Who Sing of 10,000 Victories, Swift is an expert of combining polite and professional business-speak with the desperation of the overwhelmed. Often the one doing the bulk of the legwork for Victor, Swift swoops through the aisles of Emporium on strange errands he finds polite and indirect ways to say baffle him for one reason or another. Before these tasks, his suits are pristine. Afterwards, they aren’t so lucky.

Swift is forever manifesting their stress and exasperation in ruffled feathers and aggressive snacking on fish products.

A Glory of lackadaisically shifting spreadsheets, Spreadsheet is on a work experience placement with Orbital who’s in no rush to experience work of any kind. Found most often in the Arts & Crafts section of Emporium, she likes to explore, have a chill time, and explore to find even more chill times. Sometimes Spreadsheet gets into trouble, but to him it’s a non-issue: things have a way of working themselves out in the end, so why waste time worrying about anything?

It’s not a secret that Spreadsheet does pretty much nothing on their job description, but the lack of punishment has led to rumours that they know someone important, either at Orbital, Emporium, or both, and is exploiting that connection.